Chapter 5 - The Ones In The Trunk

Jane spent the remainder of the night reviewing footage and trying to pick any more clues out of the grainy images, but nothing else revealed itself. By the time the sun rose, her back was sore, her eyes were grainy, and she was thoroughly irritated with herself for not being able to find anything else.

Cooper awoke with a yawn and a stretch and once he was good and awake, she hopped into the shower, trying to touch as little of any of the surfaces as possible. Both the sink and toilet were stained a dark yellow near the drains and the water from the shower had a bit of a funny smell. She’d been in worse.

Somewhat refreshed, she stepped out of the bathroom into the smell of fresh coffee. Her mouth almost watered.

“Where’d you get this?” she asked, picking up the Styrofoam cup off the table.

“Front desk,” Cooper said. His cheeks already showed a bit of a rugged stubble, which she had to admit she rather liked.

“How is it this good?” She took a small sip, letting the bitter taste fill her mouth. Paradise.

“Ross has a brother that supplies him with imported coffee.”

“Mm hmm,” she blew on her cup. “And who is Ross?”

Cooper shrugged. “Guy who owns the place.”

Of course, Cooper made friends with him. They both went after information in their own ways. She trusted computers and electronics and gadgets to get data, whereas Cooper relied on a more human touch. He had a way about him, where he could become best friends with an entire room of people in ten minutes and he was brilliant at finding local intel. There was an incredibly high chance that knowing that the guy who owned the motel was named Ross and his brother sold coffee was information of absolutely no strategic value, but that had never stopped either of them before.

“It’s nearly eight,” she said. “Time to call Richards?”

“Yeah. Let me put him on speaker.”

Richards was one of the hordes of people they knew with specific capabilities that were otherwise unavailable to the general public. She and Cooper had a guy for everything. Richards’ was a doctor, had access to advanced equipment and was grotesquely unethical. They’d met him in Micronesia and immediately recognized how valuable he could be. At the time, he’d been having some delicate problems with the local criminal element who were quite upset that he hadn’t paid the thirty thousand he owed from a weekend of gambling. Jane and Cooper told him they’d take care of it, with a single condition; namely that he’d owe them for the rest of his life. Easy enough to pay off his debt, thirty grand was a bargain for what they’d get in return. No need for Richards to know that, though. They told him stories about a bloodbath, that they’d killed their way up and down the underworld to protect him. Truthfully, it had been a fairly pleasant, if unmemorable, meeting with an accountant and a subsequent transfer of funds. Most of the criminal underworld was blandly corporate.

She closed her laptop and threw it on the bed to make room for Cooper’s phone. They both huddled around the small table while Cooper punched in a number. She listened while the phone rang. Just as she was thinking they weren’t going to get a response, someone answered with a click.

“What?”

That sounded like Richards, alright.

“Richards,” Cooper said. “It’s Coop.”

“And Jane,” Jane piped in.

“One implies the other,” Richards said, dryly. “What do you want? I thought you were retired.”

“Can’t we catch up with old friends?”

“Let me know when you make some, I’ll come to the party.”

“Funny guy,” Cooper said. “Isn’t he a funny guy, Jane?”

“Very funny,” she agreed. “Would be a shame if he was so funny he got the shit kicked out of him by two very impatient people.”

“Oh, I’m sure it doesn’t need to come to that. What do you think, Richards? Does it need to come to that?”

“You’re both normally more subtle than this,” Richards deadpanned through the phone.

“How much shit are you in that you’re skipping the leadup and getting right to threats?”

“It’s been a bit of day, I’ll give you that,” Jane said. “Where can we meet you?”

“For what?”

“We’ve got a couple of bodies we’d like you to take a look at. We’re trying to figure out who they are.”

“Someone decided to un-retire you?”

“Seems that way,” Jane said.

“Why me?” Richards whined. “I don’t want to get caught up in whatever shit you’re both neck-deep in.”

“And I don’t want to break my knuckles caving in parts of your skull, but here we are.”

“Jesus Christ, Jane,” Richards sighed. “Nice to know retirement hasn’t mellowed you.”

“We’re sort of pressed for time,” Cooper said. “Normally we’d be a bit more elegant in our threats, but it’s been a long night.”

“I’m sorry?” Jane said. “What was wrong with my threat?”

“It felt a bit forced,” Richards said.

“Really.” Her voice was flat. She was tired of getting notes on her quips. Cooper, picking up on her irritation hurried the conversation along.

“Just give us an address,” he said.

“Fine. Here.” Richards read it out. “Meet me in one hour.”

He hung up.

“It’s about forty minutes away,” Cooper said, checking his phone. “We can grab breakfast on the way. I’ll take us past a bagel place since we’re in Montreal and you can grab a latte. Extra foam.”

She gave him a slight smile. Cooper always knew how to soothe her irritation.

“Let’s go see Richards.”

**

Exactly fifty-eight minutes later, they pulled up to a derelict veterinarian office in a strip mall on the outskirts of Montreal, in the middle of nowhere. It was wedged between a payday loans business with bars on the windows and a place selling discount Persian rugs, also with bars on the window. There was only one other car in the parking lot, which she assumed belonged to Richards.

Balancing bagels and coffee, she stepped out of their vehicle into the hazy, morning sun. The air already had a sticky feel, and she was glad she’d dressed light in a dark red tank top and thin cotton pants. Cooper was wearing a t-shirt that hugged his frame quite nicely and standard blue jeans. They looked like an ordinary couple, out for an adventure.

Richards must have seen them pull up, because he stepped out of the building to greet him.

He was overweight, his frame pushing against his clothes like they were holding him in out of pity. His face was ruddy, blotched with irritation, and his thinning hair clung to his scalp in stubborn wisps, spread out in a heroic attempt to cover the area. He had the look of a man who spent too much time under fluorescent lights, breathing recirculated air, surviving on vending machine coffee.

“Richards,” she said.

“Jane,” he nodded by way of greeting. “Cooper. Let’s get this over with.”

“The bodies are in the trunk,” she said.

“Bring them to the back. What are you looking for, exactly?”

“Run the fingerprints,” Cooper said. “DNA. Whatever you can do, but just tell us who these people are and who they work for.”

Richards wiped his hand across his sweaty brow. “Let’s get this over with.”

Working together, they got the bodies from the trunk into the building and positioned them on two metal operating tables in the back. The place obviously hadn’t seen a customer in decades, but it had a surprising amount of equipment; Jane thought she recognized a DNA sequencer, and tucked off into a corner was something that looked like a gas chronograph.

“Nice setup,” she said.

“It gets the job done and it’s private. Let’s see what we’re looking at.”

The bodies were still covered in a tarp and Richards threw it back to reveal the faces on the corpses.

He stared at them for a solid five seconds without saying anything.

“Huh,” he finally said.

“Yeah, that’s about our read on it as well,” Cooper said.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.” Richards pulled out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and bent over to inspect the bodies. “The reconstruction is nearly flawless. Who do you think this is? Russia?”

“This is your department, not ours,” Jane said. “Just find out what you can. How long will this take?’

“Most of the day,” Richard said, puttering around with his equipment. Various machines hummed to life as he turned them on. Now that he was engaged in the problem, all traces of sarcastic irritation had vanished. Richards was an absolute scumbag, but he was also brilliant, and it seemed as if this mystery had gotten his attention. “I’ll want some samples from both of you. Blood, hair, urine. Your fingerprints, too.”

“Pass,” Jane said immediately. “Hard, aggressive pass.”

Richards fixed her with a look. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. I’ve heard they’re doing some pretty gruesome stuff with cloning, getting really close.”

Cooper stepped forward, putting a very slight edge of menace on top of his normally amenable disposition.

“It would be a shame,” he said quietly, leaning over to put his face very close to Richards.

“If every single sample you take from us wasn’t either returned or destroyed at the end of this. A real shame. Do you know what I’m talking about, Richards?”

“Copy,” Richards said, licking his lips. “I know what you’re saying, Cooper.”

Cooper held his close gaze on Richards for a few more seconds, before finally straightening and putting on a big grin. “That’s so great. I’m glad we’re seeing eye to eye on this.” He turned to Jane. “What do you think?”

“I hate this,” she said. “Richards, I’m going to be more direct than my husband. If you don’t give us every drop of those samples back, I’m going to hunt you down and break every bone in both of your legs. Once I get past the femur, it’s actually quite easy. I know this from experience. Now. Let’s get it over with.”

Richards, now completely pale, nodded without saying a word. After getting samples it was ten thirty, giving them at least six or so hours to kill. Rolling her eyes at Cooper, they made their way back to the car. Ordinarily, they’d use the free time to go sightseeing, but it didn’t exactly feel like the safest thing to do, so she resigned herself to a very boring afternoon browsing garbage on the internet.

It was just nearing dinner when Richards finally finished. She and Cooper had drove to a pizza place a few miles down the road run by two Greek brothers who didn’t speak a word of English, only sold pepperoni pizza, and seemed deeply annoyed that people were trying to purchase their product. In Jane’s experience, these sorts of places always the best food, and as she bit into her first slice, she wasn’t disappointed. Fresh basil. Real mozzarella. Pure heaven. Richards grabbed a slice and began to talk around a mouthful of food.

“What kind of shit is this?” he began.

“Just ordinary pepperoni,” Cooper said. “I think there maybe put oregano in it.”

“Not that. The bodies. Is this a joke? What are you two up to?”

Something in Richard’s voice got Jane’s attention putting her on instant high alert. He wasn’t doing his standard, ‘how dare you’, exhausted outrage routine, this was something else. She made note of the sweat stains under his arms, the way his eyes flicked around the room, the way he couldn’t stop touching his face. His normal demeanour was annoyance and he wasn’t annoyed.

He was terrified.

“What did you find,” she jumped in, almost not wanting to hear the answer. “Who are they? Who sent them?”

"I don’t know who sent them. I did every test I could think of. Fingerprints, DNA, hair follicle sampling, dental records, retinal mapping, isotope analysis. I even ran a protein degradation scan to check how long they'd been dead. I put these assholes through the ringer.”

“So?” Jane leaned forward. “Who are they?”

Richards wiped his arm across his forehead

“They’re you.”

Both she and Cooper were too practised, too long in this business to outwardly react, but inside, her heart did a backflip. Whatever she’d expected to hear, this certainly wasn’t it, and she wondered if Richards was screwing with them somehow.

“Say more?” Cooper asked.

“They. Are. You,” Richards said, washing the pronouncement down with a mouthful of pop.

“Not ‘sort of’ like you, not ‘close to’ you. You. The corpses lying on my operating tables at the back of this facility are you. You and Jane.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Jane said, trying to keep her voice level. “Like you mean they’re clones? Perfect clones?”

“No,” Richards shook his head. “Even perfect clones would have some slight genetic drift, some unavoidable minor anomalies would occur in the billions of possible sequences. You’d expect to see some variance. The two back there are you. Down to the microbe. Not a copy. Not a twin. Not clever surgery. You.”

Richards dark eyes bored into her from above his ruddy cheeks, his voice rising in intensity as he delivered the results of his findings. Jane’s brain had kicked into overdrive as she was trying to run scenarios for why in the hell Richards would say something like this. There’s no way he’d lie to them. Would he? Was this some kind of trick? Did someone get to him?

If it wasn’t any of those, then she’d be forced to accept his insane utterances at face value and there was no universe where she could wrap her head around that.

“You must have made a mistake,” Cooper said. His face was pale and that, more than anything, almost made Jane break. Cooper never showed anything. Ever. He must be shook to his absolute core.

“I didn’t make a mistake,” Richards said. “I triple checked. Why do you think I ran so many god damn tests?”

“How is this possible?” Jane’s voice came out a flat monotone. She should be more outraged, more aggressive, but rather than spring to life, her brain was shutting down. She barely even cared about the answer. This was too much to process. How was it them?

“It’s not.” Richards ran a weary hand across his eyes. “I’ve done what you asked. I found out who the bodies are. They are you. I don’t know why they’re both genetically you down to the molecule, but with variations for things like weight and hair length. I am probably going to go home and drink myself unconscious and try to avoid thinking about what this could mean.”

Jane leaned across the table to grab him. “What could it mean?” she growled.

Richards writhed in her grasp. “I don’t know. If they’re clones, it’s more advanced than anything I’ve ever heard of. It would be stuff that I didn’t even know was possible. This is in the realm of deep science fiction. As in, nothing I found is possible based on what I know of modern science. All I can tell is that the people hunting you is… you.”

“The missing month,” Jane said. She thought she might be sick.

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about and I don’t want to know,” Richards muttered. “You’re wrapped up in shit I want no part of. I’m begging you to burn my number and never call me again. Although, I suppose there’s a very good chance you’re going to be dead with whatever hell you’ve brought on yourself.”

“Shut up,” Jane said, but her heart wasn’t in it. She couldn’t take her eyes from Cooper. He looked as shook as she felt. They needed to get out of here.

“We’re leaving,” she said to Richards. “I want you to burn the bodies. Burn everything. This whole place. Burn it to the ground.”

“Way ahead of you,” Richards said. “I don’t want any trace of this.”

“It’s all good,” Jane said. “We burnt down our house last night. It’s been one of those weeks, you know? Wednesdays are tricky.” She barely understood what she was saying.

“Let’s go, Jane.” Cooper gently took her hand and led her away from the reception desk. She rubbed her face to try to clear the cobwebs.

Pulling out of the parking lot with a cloud of dust, they drove back to the motel in stunned silence.

On to chapter 6

***

What even the hell? Richards wasn't any help at all! What does he mean, "it's them"? What comes next for Jane and Cooper?

I'll tell you this much gang - it's looking more and more like this is going to be a novella, maybe 35-40k. That means we're nearly at the halfway mark! I pretty much know the remaining beats, but always happy to listen to crowd feedback.

Thanks for reading!